A Day Fear Reached a New Level

ASPEN HILL, Md. -- Alfred Love woke up to the clatter of his telephone -- and a sick sense of deja vu. His neighbor had news: another sniper attack in Montgomery County, this one right at the foot of the hill.

By daybreak their apartment complex was hemmed with police tape. Love couldn’t get to work; when his niece told him flatly she was too afraid to go to school, he didn’t have the heart to force her.

“It started here, and now it’s back,” he said glumly. “To tell you the truth, I think he lives here.”

Nowhere has the sniper’s stark campaign of psychological warfare been so keenly felt as in Montgomery County. It was here that an unknown gunman kicked off a bloody rampage through two states and the nation’s capital, and it was to Montgomery County that he appears to have returned.

People here are cranky from worry; weary of sitting around indoors; sick of the wail of sirens and the thrum of news helicopters overhead. Maybe the worst part is that they’re getting used to it. Or maybe it’s that they believe, almost every one, that the killer lives among them.

“Everybody feels trapped,” said Mario Villalta, a 16-year-old student who missed class Tuesday because police cordoned off his apartment complex. “We can’t go anywhere, and everybody’s angry. The teachers say they’ll catch him, don’t worry, but we don’t believe that.”

For miles around, the sniper has clamped a vast region of 5 million people into a state of suspended terror. Commuters spent Tuesday morning trapped in endless lines of vehicles as police hunted for the elusive killer among the roadways -- to no avail. Phone lines jammed as police chiefs, school superintendents and county officials debated whether to keep schools open. Then, as the day drew to an end, parents sped to pick up their children with the echo of a threat playing in their heads: “Your children are not safe anywhere at any time.”

Normalcy was just starting to creep back to Montgomery County. People were beginning to relax a little, were laughing through tightened throats and reminding themselves that there’s no point in hiding. In the 20 days since a bullet tore through the front window of a nearby craft shop, the surrounding community has passed through drastic mood changes.

These people watched while an invisible gunman cut down four of their neighbors in less than 24 hours. Then the carnage spread -- into the capital, east to a neighboring Maryland county, then deep into the Virginia countryside. And the people of Montgomery County came to the quiet conclusion, fed by profilers and by common sense, that the sniper is hiding in plain sight, in their midst.

“After the lull, everybody thought he lives here in the area, but he’ll travel around to kill in other places,” said a 31-year-old mover who declined to give his name. “People were starting to relax.”

This bedroom town of dipping hills and gated complexes was still deep in slumber when 35-year-old Conrad Johnson was shot to death on the steps of a commuter bus. Neighbors have seen the drivers lingering down there so often they hardly notice them anymore as they drink their coffee and fill out crossword puzzles, passing the scraps of time between their routes. In retrospect, like the other victims, they were easy targets.

“I’m so frightened I don’t like to come to work anymore,” said Concepcion Cortes, an El Salvador native who waited for his bus behind the shelter of a sidewalk newspaper box. “But what can I do? Everybody has to work.”

Wastes Three Hours

Bent on getting to work in Gaithersburg, Nicholas Cardenas wasted three hours driving into traffic jams, then executing nimble U-turns to circle back. Try as he might, he couldn’t get through. Finally, in desperate need of a bathroom, he gave up and headed back to where he began -- a few blocks from the scene of the dawn shooting.

“Next time I hear this on the radio, I’m just going to stay home,” he said. “It’s not worth it.”

For businesses like Shipley Plumbing in Maryland, the police roadblocks are expensive quagmires of missed appointments, wasted fuel and lost hours. “It’s devastating my income,” owner Ron Shipley said. “I’ve just got trucks idling. I’ve got customers asking: ‘Why didn’t you get here?’ ”

Time is passing. Fall is flaming red and orange in the woods; trees weep dead leaves over empty sidewalks and the bite of winter has stolen into the air. The ground of Aspen Hill is soft underfoot with fallen pine needles. The craft shop window that caught the sniper’s first bullet has been mended; the panes are bright with painted leaves and pumpkins.

“You could throw a bowling ball through the shopping centers around here without hitting anybody,” said the owner of a flower shop at the edge of an Aspen Hill cemetery. Terrified of being targeted next, she refused to give her name and asked that the name of her business not appear -- but she couldn’t control her anger at the mention of the sniper.

“This is horrendous; it’s like a war zone now,” she said, her voice rising over the beat of the helicopters. “We have families to take care of! People buy something and I thank them for coming out of their houses!”

Harmony Hills Elementary School in Silver Spring was tamped down tighter than a prison Tuesday.

Every window was covered with blinds. The dodge-ball ring was deserted, the slide abandoned and dead leaves piled on the sidewalks. Only the locked cars in the parking lot hinted that school carried on, hidden behind the bricks.

“It’s crazy, you know? Crazy,” said Sam Tapri.

In Richmond, Va., schools were closed for the second day in a row.

But to the ire of some parents, many schools around the Beltway were determined to keep on teaching.

“We thought hard on Sept. 11 about where they were safest,” Arlington, Va., School Board member Dave Foster said. “We concluded then and I do now that in school they are as safe as they can be.”

Long before classes let out at Washington’s Brightwood Elementary School, parents clogged the street out front. When the time came, the adults rushed the foyer under the watch of guards and a police cruiser to scoop up their children and spirit them home.

“I don’t feel I can trust anyone anymore,” said one of the mothers. “How do I know that that man across the street or this woman next to me is not going to harm my children?”

In Aspen Hill, residents are reduced to eyeing one another suspiciously, scanning each face for a hint of homicide. This neighborhood is a wildly diverse mix of white-collar professionals and blue-collar laborers, a melange of immigrants from Latin America, Africa, Eastern Europe, Asia and the Middle East.

It is the sort of place where people come and go, where one doesn’t necessarily know one’s neighbors and where nobody looks particularly out of place. It isn’t hard to disappear here.

“It makes you prejudiced. It makes you look at your neighbors differently,” Love said. “And that’s not fair. It is not fair that we’re under siege like this.”

Creeps From Home

But nobody can stay inside forever.

Sooner or later, the cupboard is bare, the tank is empty or it’s time to show up at work. When an Aspen Hill nurse named Emerita Ugay crept from her condominium to drive to the hospital, she quaked visibly in the fresh air.

“What if he shot this guy, walked back home and watched it on TV?” she asked, waving an arm at the empty brick facades of her gated complex. “I think he did, and it’s really scary. Oh, my God, I’m scared. What will we do?”

When Isaac Vonero Richards slipped into a pullover, tugged his Yankees cap over his ears and made for the front door, his family called after him, urged him to be sensible, stay inside. But Richards, who moved to Maryland from Liberia a year ago, ignored their admonitions. “It’s hard to stay inside all day,” he said. Instead, he went for a walk, breathing in the cold, spiced autumn air.

“In my country it was war and shooting every day, and every day an uprising,” he said. “Nobody knows who’s next. As we’re standing out here, we could be shot. You have to live your life.”

If the sniper stays on the run much longer, Richards said, his neighbors will get used to the dread. They will assimilate. “They’ll get tired of it,” he said. “They may be frightened today, but eventually they will have to come out again.”

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Times staff writers Lisa Getter and Faye Fiore contributed to this report.